Samsung 845DC EVO SSD 960 Gigabyte Review

Next to the 845DC PRO Samsung has also launched the 845DC EVO series. This drive is equipped with TLC NAND flash memory chips and therefore it's suitable for read-intensive workloads, preserving precious write cycles. Furthermore TLC NAND allows for highly competitive pricing, which you will get with this drive. Overall we're curious to see how this drive is going to perform. ﻿

Samsung Electronics is finally making a push in the enterprise SSD
market whilst also making good headway in the consumer market. First we have the
850 PRO for end-users, then the 845DC PRO and the 845DC EVO enterprise-grade
SSDs, which we will be reviewing in this article. In the case of the 850 PRO the
most significant upgrade is the NAND Flash, since Samsung is now bringing 3D
V-NAND to the mass market, enabling a new level of reliability and endurance.
The 845DC EVO is a datacenter optimized SSD with TLC memory, recommended to be
used in read-intense environments. You might be asking why Samsung is using TLC
NAND in enterprise-grade drives, since P/E-cycle count is much lower than what
you get with MLC NAND. As we already mentioned Samsung is targeting
read-intensive environments, where P/E-cycle count is secondary if not tertiary.

As already mentioned, Samsung
recommends the 845DC EVO for read-intensive environments, therefore sequential
as well as random read performance is consitently high, but when it comes to
sequential as well as random write performance this drive cannot keep up with
the 845DC Pro for instance. In the case of enterprise-grade drives, endurance is
usually a main concern. A closer look at rating with the 960 GB 845DC shows a
value of 600 TBW, which is just a mere fraction of what you get with the 845DC
PRO. What you need to consider with the EVO version is that Samsung is
recommending this drive for read-intensive environments, which means write
processes aren't of primary concern.
Another necessary feature of an enterprise-grade SSD is data-path-protection in
the
case of sudden power-loss. For this purpose there is an array of tantalum
capacitors ensuring data residing in the volatile 1024 MB DDR3 buffer can be
safely written into non-volatile NAND Flash memory.

Samsung is using the MEX controller
for the 845DC EVO SSDs. Compared to the older MDX controller, that's also being
used on the 845DC PRO, the new model clockes 100 MHz quicker at 400 MHz.
Checking what's going on under the hood reveals there is the same ARM Cortex-R4
based controller there was with the predecessor, which features three cores.

Looking at the exterior of the SSDs, the Samsung 845DC EVO is only
available in the 2.5 inch form factor with a height of 7 millimeters. The
interface is SATA 3.1, and we're curious to see whether Samsung is planning on
releasing a SAS version of this drive. This might be a move demanded by the
markets, since the majority of datacenters are built upon SAS infrastructure.